Tesla Motors Supercharger Map With Charging Stall Numbers

While exploring the Tesla Motors rollout of the Supercharging infrastructure, we thought it might be interesting to do a visualization of number of charging stalls at each location.

And here it is – one map for the U.S. and a second one for Europe.

The difference in charging spot numbers indicates that Tesla is adapting infrastructure to predicted needs – on one side based on the number of Model S EVs bought or ordered and on the other side based on usefulness of the particular route.

Most stations are even, but some have 5 or 7 stalls, which is strange because typically one Supercharger handles two spots. Maybe space constrains prevented Tesla from fully utilizing its two-spots per charger concept?

Tesla Superchargers in U.S.

In the U.S., most locations have 6 or more spots. Some routes have just 2 or 4 and large cities like New York and Los Angeles have just 4. Eight-spot stations probably represent the epicenter of Model S deliveries.

Of interest in Europe is that the Netherlands has two 8-spot stations, but Switzerland and Austria just 2-spot stations, which possibly indicates from where the highest number of orders come.

Norway of course looks strong in this juxtaposition. In Germany, Tesla is building a large network with upgraded power to 135 kW, but sales are for now much lower than in Norway.

Tesla Superchargers in Europe

In total, Tesla already deployed 200 Superchargers with almost 400 spots, at over 60 sites. On average, a Tesla station has ~6 spots.

The reason for odd numbered stalls is a location, such as Harris Ranch (in California) started with only one stall. When an additional 6 stalls were added, they were in a new location that had more space. Since there was no reason to remove the single stall, that location now has a total of 7 stalls.

I assume this chart is not from Tesla, as it seems a bit out of date. For example, Gilroy, CA has 10 stalls, but only shows 4 on the map above. I suspect it will be difficult to maintain this as Tesla is adding new Supercharges and expanding existing ones, but it’s cool to see the build out anyway.

GerogeS – the stalls each have an individual connection cable. The Supercharger electronics bays are behind the white fence in the picture above. Each bay handles two stalls.

OK, I’ll try. George, the parking spaces don’t have the chargers. They are centralized behind the fenced enclosure. Each two parking spaces are wired back to a single charger (actually a stack of 10KW chargers, either 9 or 12 depending or the installation). Tesla has patents on how this charger stack is shared by multiple charging vehicles. In the current SCs, two cars share a stack. If you are sharing a stack with another car, you will see lower charge current. Since the charger will ramp down when the battery gets about 50% or so full, this improves utilization of the charging hardware.

The parking slots are number 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B and so on. 2A and 2B, share a single stack.

As Tesla grows sooner or later they will have to charge money for charging.
When they have millions of cars on the road it will just be an unbearable economic burden.
Because not only do you have to cover the map with litlte red dots but that number next to it will have to keep growing. 8, 16, 64…

I haven’t actually done the math but I fear the numbers will get ugly. If they can fill 8 slots already with just the few cars they have sold so far it will be a staggering demand.

I think they will need entire parking lots for hundreds of cars with a 50MW feed.

I bet they can simply charge for the kwh used per. The cost of building superchargers must be amortized by the price of each vehicle. Even if they charge only for electricity. It will be a great deal for customers.

This issue has been discussed on the club forums. I believe that it’s not anywhere as bad as it looks because because a) most people will charge at home, b) Telsa could simply raise the cost of the one time fee and c) Tesla plans on adding solar capacity to every SC (perhaps even netting out earnings from that).

The current price for adding on supercharging is $2000 when buying the car, at $.11 per KWH (national average), that is 20 MWH of electricity. This equates to more than 50K miles of driving (at 330 wh/mi). We won’t know the average number of miles a Model S will last but if it’s something like 100K that says Tesla will be ahead if the owners use Superchargers for less than half their miles. I suspect it will more like 10% or less.

Big oil isn’t that much worried just yet. What they are worried about is the millions of lost jobs in the USA keeping people from commuting to work at factories that have closed down. I think big oil would be pleased if the strength of the USA came back through more manufacturing, jobs growth and economic soundness. But we are less than 4% of the world population. Add Canada and it’s about 5%. The real future of big oil sales is in Asia/India. And Russia and OPEC nations will be serving them much of that. If we want to fight big oil, we need to hire more people in the USA, build cheaper EVs, install EVSEs at our business places and get politicians on board supporting the technology. All quite hard to do with the current national political and economic landscape.

I love super chargers they are a very exciting marketing tool, I lived most of my life in the eu and it never once entred my mind to drive from hamburg to milan. I’m not saying don’t have them but really you won’t need them,